The Last Delivery

The round had four hundred and eleven customers in 1994 and has eleven now.

This is not a decline anyone at the dairy is upset about; it is simply what happened to doorstep milk between 1994 and now, and Ronnie has watched the whole of it from the float.

The dairy told him in September. The round closes in December. They were decent about it — he is sixty-eight and it is not a redundancy, it is a retirement they have been politely not mentioning for three years.

The eleven

Three are habit. They could get milk anywhere and they get it from Ronnie because they always have, and two of them have said, unprompted, that they will just stop having milk delivered rather than switch, which he has told them is daft.

Four are convenience. Flats where the shop is a walk.

Four are not able to get to the shop.

That is the number that matters and it is the number Ronnie has been turning over since September, because those four have between them a granddaughter who comes Sundays, a warden who comes twice a week, and — this is the one — nothing.

Mrs Pryce

Number 8 Ffordd Isaf. Ninety-four. Two pints Monday, Thursday, Saturday, since 1979.

Ronnie has been doing this round since 1991 and she was on it when he took it over.

He has been in her kitchen perhaps four times in thirty-four years, all of them because something had happened. He does not go in. That is not the arrangement and both of them would find it strange.

What there is, is this: the bottles go on the step, and the empties come out, and if the empties do not come out by the next delivery, Ronnie knocks.

He has knocked eleven times in thirty-four years. Nine of them were nothing. Once it was a fall and she was on the floor of the hall and had been for about three hours. Once — in 2016 — it was something worse and the ambulance came and she was in hospital eleven days.

What he did in October

He rang the council.

He was on hold for forty minutes and then explained the situation to a woman who was kind and who took a note and who explained that Mrs Pryce would need to be referred for an assessment and that she could not self-refer over the phone and that a family member or a professional would need to initiate it.

Ronnie said he was neither.

The woman said she was sorry.

What he did in November

He rang the surgery, who could not discuss a patient.

He rang the community warden scheme, which covers the estate on the other side of town and not Ffordd Isaf.

He rang the dairy and asked, without much hope, whether the round could keep the four, and was told — reasonably, by a man who was clearly uncomfortable — that a four-customer round is not a round.

He asked whether he could do it himself in his own car.

The man from the dairy said that he could not sell dairy products out of his own car, which is true, and then said, off the record, that he had no view on what a retired man did with his own mornings.

The list

Ronnie made a list. It has eleven names on it and next to each one a note of who checks.

Nine of them are covered. He worked that out over three weeks by asking, which is not something he has ever done on this round in thirty-four years, and which took some getting used to on both sides.

Two are not.

The letter

He wrote to Mrs Pryce's son.

He had never met him. He got the address from Mrs Pryce herself by asking her, directly, on a Thursday in November, standing on the step, which was the single hardest thing he has done in his working life.

She gave it to him. She did not ask why. She said, "He's very busy," which Ronnie has thought about a great deal since.

The letter took him nine drafts. The final version is four sentences long and does not accuse anybody of anything and says only that the milk round is ending in December, that he has been keeping an eye on the empties for thirty-four years, and that after Christmas nobody will be.

He posted it on the 2nd.

The last delivery

19 December. Two pints.

The empties were out.

There was also a card on the step, under the empties, with his name on it.

He read it in the float with the engine running. It said, in handwriting that had got much worse since the last time he saw it in 2016, that she had been told about the letter and that her son was coming at the weekend and that he was going to look at some things.

At the bottom it said: You should have said something years ago.

Ronnie sat there for a bit.

Then he wrote back — on the back of a delivery note, because that is what was in the cab — and put it through the door, which is not the arrangement and never has been.

It said: So should you.

He does the round in his own car on Mondays now. No milk. He knocks.